


you are the white in my eyes

by heyfightme



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: (because of the zombies), Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, But also, Character Death, Falling In Love, Getting Together, Homophobic Language, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, In The Flesh AU, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Minor Violence, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 06:08:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17360468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heyfightme/pseuds/heyfightme
Summary: “I hit my head, more than once. I played hockey. The time that did it, I was twenty, and I went down hard and just… didn’t get back up again. Well,” Bitty huffs a laugh, the absurdity washing over him as he watches Jack’s eyes flick up to him, mouth a little slack and mindless, “I guess in the end, I did.”AnIn the FleshBitty/Jack AU, in which two zombies fall in love.





	you are the white in my eyes

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this in September, and intended to post it before Halloween (because of the zombies), but couldn't quite get it finished to the point I wanted. I put it away for a while, then brought it back, because I still liked the idea and wanted to explore it more.
> 
>  
> 
> It is based in the post-apocalyptic world of _In the Flesh_ , which is really a must-watch. Hopefully, for those of you who have seen the show, this does it justice - and for those who haven't, hopefully it encourages you to check it out! Also, apologies for the title, but is it an _In the Flesh_ AU if it doesn't have Keaton Henson?  
>  
> 
> __  
> This is dedicated to all the sad gays out there <3

**_And please do not hurt me, love,_ **  
**_I am a fragile one, and you are the white in my eyes_ **  
**_Please do not break my heart,_ **  
**_I think it's had enough pain to last the rest of my life._ **

**\- Keaton Henson, '10am, Gare Du Nord'**

 

“I’m worried about my mom. When I got ill, she took it kind of… she pretended like it wasn’t happening, even when I was in hospice. This’ll be the same, probably.”

 

Bitty can’t look at the girl who’s talking – can’t consider the slow death, having to watch your loved ones lose you. At least with him, it had been sudden. At least with him, he hadn’t realized it was happening.

 

“You have to be understanding,” the counsellor is saying, typical put-on sweetness, that same weighing of every word. “Your families will be making a big adjustment. You have to be accommodating. Try to put them at ease.” There is a scoff from somewhere in the circle. Bitty’s mouth twitches on its own, vague threat of a smile. “You have to earn back their trust.”

 

Bitty had run down one of the ladies from his mama’s church group, right on the main street of Madison. He had sunk his teeth into her shoulder, and shattered her skull on the asphalt, and pulled her brains free with his fingers. Now, his fingernails are blackened at the edges and he sometimes scrubs them too hard, with no pain or blood to tell him when to stop. A tiny patch of bone shows through on the first knuckle of his right index finger.

 

The flashbacks, they tell him, are a side effect of the neurotriptyline. Not everyone gets them, they tell him.

“Lucky me,” he had said, and lurched awake that night to the image of feeding himself on the insides of the man who had run the grocer.

 

Group therapy, if it can be called that, is mandatory. If it were anything about overcoming his creeping guilt, Bitty would happily attend. As it is, though, the sessions more seem to run the line of how to settle suspicious minds and curb the living’s understandable fear. What Bitty knows is this: his parents are good at ignoring things they don’t want to believe.

 

He doesn’t contribute to the group. He sits in his government-issue grey scrubs, and listens to the stories of the other Partially Deceased, and fights down smiles whenever the tall man with the sure posture scoffs to himself. He has sharp cheekbones and a blank expression, and a strength in his stance that sets him apart from the hunched backs and shuffling movements of the others in the group. That, and his white eyes with their piercing pupils, the ghost of blue in the iris. Bitty’s own eyes have turned more yellow, the blackness in the center spidering out like veins. He looks in the mirror sometimes, and thinks he could hypnotize himself.

 

The man from group – the handsome man, if Bitty is being honest – never speaks either, just sits with his legs casually spread and his hands on his knees. Where others in the group have scars and mangled limbs and braces to keep them moving, his death is invisible. Bitty’s own death makes itself known as a phantom feeling in the side of his head. His fingers are numb, and he can’t see the skull fracture when he tries to find it in the mirror, but he knows it’s there.

 

He is idly running dead fingers over the side of his head, seeking the not-really-there sensation of pressure, when the bodies around him start to rise. He lurches to his feet and makes a beeline for the scoffing man before really thinking it over.

“Hi. Hello.”

Not even standing yet, the man looks up at Bitty with his characteristic blank expression. Bitty clutches his own arm, shoulders hunching and shrinking him down.

“I, um. I just wanted to say that I appreciate your contributions to the group.”

The man blinks. “I didn’t say anything.” His voice is deep, but quieter than Bitty had been expecting.

“Oh, I think you said plenty.” Bitty leans forward, playing at conspiracy, bolstered by the slight bewilderment introducing itself to the man’s expression. “Believe me, I too am snorting with derision on the inside. My manners are a curse that prevent me from making my skepticism known.”

“Are you saying I don’t have manners?” There is a quirk at the corner of his mouth that betrays amusement, which is why Bitty feels bold enough to reply, “There is no world in which making horse noises is considered politeness.”

 

The man cocks an eyebrow, rises to his feet, and extends a hand.

“I’m Jack.”

Bitty lets go of his own arm to shake. “Eric Bittle. You can call me Bitty.”

 

* * *

 

 

Jack is good at cards, bad at chess, and a wiz at making cryptic statements.

“We were big on checkers at the clinic,” he tells Bitty over a hand of sugar-packet-poker, and Bitty stares at him until he looks up from his cards. Jack blinks. “I was in rehab,” he offers, but it’s no sort of explanation.

“I was in college,” Bitty retorts.

Jack frowns. “No, this was when I was eighteen, nineteen.” He looks back to his cards, and no light has been shed at all. “The first time.”

 

He falls silent, glaring slightly at the table, and Bitty watches him with a bitten lip. There is a shadow of a thought that is solidifying, that he has learned something about Jack’s life and death which needs to be reciprocated.

“I hit my head, more than once. I played hockey. The time that did it, I was twenty, and I went down hard and just… didn’t get back up again. Well,” he huffs a laugh, the absurdity washing over him as he watches Jack’s eyes flick up to him, mouth a little slack and mindless, “I guess in the end, I did.”

“You played hockey?”

“I played hockey,” Bitty agrees.

“I played hockey.”

Bitty thinks for a moment that Jack has lost it, is just parroting, before he realizes it’s a new statement. He smiles.

“Well, snap.”

“I was AHL. The first time, before the draft, I – it was prescription. I lost track. And the drinking. But I got back in, for a while. I wanted to… it was like, proving myself, I guess. The second time, it was a mistake. I didn’t mean to. I don’t think they know that. My parents. They probably think it was on purpose.”

He speaks quiet, as usual, a low murmur that Bitty has to concentrate to hear. Even with Jack’s stilted reluctance, he is laying himself bare. Bitty’s smile slips, and he bites into his lip again without feeling the sharpness of his teeth.

“It sounds… dramatic, or something. Saying I died twice. I haven’t told anyone else.” The frown is still clinging to Jack’s eyes, almost like he has confused himself.

 

“Maybe third time’ll stick.” It seems a habit when he’s around Jack, saying things without thinking. Jack’s eyebrows raise in response, and he finally looks up from the table, eyes wide.

“Should I take that as a threat?”

“Lord, no. A warning. Reminder, I suppose.”

“I think I’m done with dying, actually.” He levels Bitty with a significant look, words ringing with something suggestive, though Bitty can’t grasp what that might be. He lays his cards face-down, and shoves all his sugar packets to the center of the table.

“I’m all in.”

 

* * *

 

They have group, and they play games, and when they line up for their neurotriptyline dose, Jack makes a habit of resting his hand on Bitty’s shoulder. At night, Bitty dreams of Jack watching as he bites at faceless bodies and blood trickles down his chin. In the daylight hours, Bitty watches the window-filtered sun playing across Jack’s cheekbones and turning his skin almost translucent. Bitty watches his blue lips as he talks, always low and quiet, and wonders if he would be able to feel anything if he pressed them with his own.

 

They are both a long way from home, but Bitty’s definition of it is stretching.

 

Their conversations stay hushed, and they talk more to each other than to the professionals they are supposed to confide in. Bitty learns that Jack was trying to redeem himself, but the higher the stakes the tighter the knot in his stomach, and at least now there was no fear. Bitty tells him about his team at Samwell, and idly muses about how they all would have fared in the rising.

“Shitty is probably out there fighting for PDS rights.”

The thought brings a bubbling hilarity to his throat, and soon he is choking laughter through phrases like “rotter is a slur” and “living privilege” as Jack watches him with a stretched expression.

 

“I wonder how many of us they killed,” Bitty muses when he calms down, and Jack averts his eyes to his lap. The rec room is quiet – one person shuffling the perimeter, a few reading paperbacks, and the guard in the corner with his hand on his holster. It knocks something free in Bitty’s chest.

 

“I wonder if they even know that I rose.” He gets a flash of Lardo aiming a gun to his head, of Ransom and Holster bearing down on him with knives, of Shitty wielding a baseball bat.

 

The difference between his worst case scenarios and his actual memories are the grit around the edges, the shuddering filter of his rabid state. They are like things that happened to him when he was half asleep. Picturing his mother crying and refusing to look at him happens with a crystalline clarity.

 

* * *

 

 

“Blue eyes or brown?” they ask him at the front of the queue, and Bitty contemplates lying just to see what he would look like. He accepts the brown lenses, and behind him Jack gets blue ones, and the pot of coverup mousse seems startlingly orange in his hand.

 

“Have you ever worn makeup?” he asks Jack as they trudge back to their rooms. He chances a glance up to find that Jack is, characteristically, frowning at him.

“No. Have you?”

“No. My complexion is naturally sparkling. Even more so now.”

Jack turns his frown on the container in his hand. “I think I was paler than this looks.”

“So what you’re telling me is that you didn’t look too different to what you do now.”

Jack blinks. “I – I don’t… no. I was…”

The ends to the sentence fill themselves in in Bitty’s head, _better_ and _brighter_ and _alive_. He watches Jack’s stilted gait, his shoulders curling in as he walks, and wants nothing more than to wrap his arms around Jack from behind – to slot himself against Jack’s body, to squeeze the bulk of his chest, and tell him that he’s beautiful. That when they’re in group or playing cards or Bitty has snuck into Jack’s room late at night to talk, he imagines tracing his fingers over the shadows of his face, and soothing them away.

 

As it is, he leaves Jack at his room with a lofty, “Call me if you need help,” and doesn’t stop until he’s seated in front of the mirror in his own room.

 

The contact lenses are a struggle, but once they slide into place, the brown comes with a barb of familiarity. It stops there, though. Bitty applies the coverup mousse with long, even strokes, just as instructed, and watches as his face becomes matte and plain. His dimensions slip away. He sweeps the orange down his neck, covering mottled grey and white until a sound from the doorway startles him.

 

Jack stands there, hands loosely pocketed, eyes flat blue and face flat orange, ghost of a smile quirking around his mouth.

“How do I look?”

 _Dead_ , Bitty wants to say. “Good,” is what comes out of his mouth.

“I didn’t know your eyes were brown,” Jack tells him. “They’re…” He visibly sets his jaw, contemplative, and Bitty averts his gaze to the mirror again.

“They’re bad. It’s weird. This brown isn’t quite right. And they’re just one color. I look ridiculous.”

“You don’t. It’s just… different. I dunno. Seems unnatural.”

 

Later that day, Bitty runs into Jack in the rec room. He is still caked in the coverup, smears of it along the collar of his scrub shirt. Bitty beats him at chess, sitting across from him with a clean face and unfiltered eyes, wanting to wipe the orange from Jack’s cheeks.

 

* * *

 

The night before their families arrive, Jack taps softly on Bitty’s door and lets himself in without waiting for a reply. He sits at the end of Bitty’s bed, forearms resting on his knees, hunched down properly for the first time since Bitty has known him.

 

“What if they won’t take me?”

Jack is always quiet, but never sounds small. His voice has shrunk, just like his form.

“They will. Honey, they will. They’ll be so happy to see you again. How could they not be?”

“I’m a shitty son. I made things so hard for them. If I could’ve just – If I was just… I didn’t even try and be better, I just fucking let myself get bad again and left them to clean up after me. I don’t really feel like adding ‘zombie’ to the list of things my father would rather change about me.”

“Don’t call yourself that, sweetheart.”

“It’s what it is though, eh? They can play around terminology all they want, but we’re fucking nightmare monsters.” He isn’t looking at Bitty, is staring at his hands, fingers loosely threaded. Eyes lidded, his eyelashes are long, fanning over pale cheeks. Bitty has seen him with coverup mousse, and he has seen him like this, bare and beautiful. He has a clear preference.

 

“We’re not. I refuse to believe that. How are we – no, listen to me,” he insists when Jack opens his mouth, interruption clear, “how are we more savage than them? I was fourteen years old and they locked me in a supply closet overnight. I got found by the janitor in the morning. My parents weren’t even looking. The quarterback rang my daddy and said I was at their team sleepover. They just believed him. And you know what? It was so dark, it’s the first thing I thought of when I woke up in my grave. I just accepted it, too. It’s what happens to people like me.”

 

“No.” It’s startling, almost, how firm Jack is about it. He looks up finally, eyes piercing, fierce and arresting. “No. You have to know that’s not true. You – you’re good, and nice and – you deserve it. Being back. You’re special.”

If he had blood, Bitty is sure he would be blushing. He holds Jack’s gaze for moments, unable to blink away, thoughts flat and unhelpful.

“Good, nice, and special. High praise indeed.” As usual, the words come without his permission. Jack’s face flickers in a frown, before his mouth twitches and he’s smiling. He’s laughing. His laugh is clear and rich, and infectious in the way that everything else about him is to Bitty – infectious in the way that not only gets Bitty laughing, but in the way that gets him not wanting to stop.

 

“I meant,” Jack is trying to say, a little breathless and dry-sounding, “I meant that you – you’re, you. It’s. You…” He clears his throat, muscle memory. Bitty feels his own smile slipping away, and the urge to lay his hand on Jack’s arm. “You are special. I can’t – I don’t know how else to put it. Sorry.”

In the end, Jack is the one who reaches out and touches Bitty, a hand laid on his knee over the bed covers. His hand there, and the moonlight in his eyes, and the ever-solemn set of his mouth have Bitty shoving back the duvet and crawling towards him on the bed.

 

He doesn’t stop until he is very close, sliding a hand against Jack’s neck, leaning in and closing his eyes at the last moment. There is no feeling, and yet there is pressure, lips on lips and a slick kind of thrill, and Jack must get it too because he makes a soft grunting noise and brings his hands to Bitty’s face. They trade kisses that are firm and sure, pressing sensation into each other’s mouths, and Bitty lets out an unneeded breath as he pulls away.

“It’s like I’ve forgotten what kissing’s like,” he tells Jack, eyes closed, cheek resting against Jack’s in the dark. “Or like I’m kissing for the first time.”

 

Jack hums, and Bitty knows Jack’s fingers are threading into his hair like it’s happening in a dream.

 

* * *

 

 

Bitty’s mama does cry, eyes welling hugely and desperately as she covers her mouth with her hand. When she says Bitty’s name – “ _Dicky_ ”, just like she’s called him since he was tiny, just like she’s been clinging to it for five years – it comes as a sob.

 

Behind her, Bitty’s daddy is stoic and serious, a hand on her shoulder and imperceptible recognition of his dead son standing before him.

“He looks so good, doesn’t he Richard? They didn’t say you’d look so good.”

Bitty had approached the coverup that morning with a clinical determination, leaving the contacts to last and not sparing a glance to the mirror before he left the room.

“You look good too, Mama.”

She breathes his name again and rushes forward, arms around him before he can drop his plastic bag of possessions. He tucks his face into her neck, inhaling and trying to get at the smell of her – but now, forever, there is sharp nothingness. He lets his bag fall and clings to his mother’s back, clings to the pressure of her against him, and his daddy says, “Good to see you, Junior.”

 

* * *

 

 

Bitty is confined to the house.

“Folks might get a shock you’re back, is all,” his mama tells him, flour smeared on her cheek and hands working a knot of dough across the countertop. “We’ll wait until a few others are back too, and then we can have a big ol’ cookout.”

Bitty uses cold fingers to rub flour into butter and knead at a pie crust, and uses an old digital camera to take a photo of the finished product. He sits at the dinner table with his parents, and picks at a slice of the blackberry pie, and holds on as long as he can before excusing himself to choke black bile into the upstairs toilet.

 

He uses his daddy’s ancient computer to print the photo of the pie, and writes about the whole experience in an exhaustive letter, which he carefully addresses with the details Jack gave to him. He tries for nonchalance as he asks his mother to post it for him, telling her only, “he’s a friend from the treatment center.”

 

Her pursed lips speak volumes.

 

Within a week, though, a return letter arrives, containing a photo of a hockey rink and a detailed account of Jack playing against his father – with Jack’s dulled reflexes, and his dad’s worn out knees, they seem evenly matched.

 _I’m going to keep practicing,_ Jack writes, _because I haven’t got anything else to do. Undead hockey league seems like a good use of my time._

He signs off with a tiny _x_ next to his name, and so Bitty feels no hesitation in peppering his next letter with hearts and kisses and a tiny doodle of his stuffed rabbit.

 

His parents had retained his room as a time capsule of his seventeen-year-old self, except for the boxes of his college things. He looks at them before sleeping every night, but can’t sift through the contents. He knows what is in there: Samwell pennants, and pictures of the team. Beyoncé posters. Strings of fairy lights. His stack of flyers from campus LGBT events – a bake sale he had to forgo for training; a mixer that he couldn’t convince anyone to go to; an apple picking trip on the day of a matty game. They are boxes of unfulfilled potential, of a life unlived and a series of choices on the road to death. He thought he had been proud, but it had been unlike the feeling he now gets taking a bare-faced, smiling selfie with a persimmon pie he won’t eat, glowing white eyes and pearly skin just for Jack.

 

* * *

 

 

Bitty doesn’t know that Marcia Gunderson is back until Marcia Gunderson is dead.

 

What Bitty’s daddy tells him, gruff and eyes averted, is this:

 

Marcia had been shopping for groceries, and Sammy Wilkins (Bitty remembers Sammy Wilkins, thickset and neckless, only ever needing one hand to send Bitty crashing into lockers or spilling to the floor, headed to his daddy’s store instead of college) had remembered Marcia’s funeral with the open casket, pulled his gun, and when she started to scream, put a bullet between her eyes. The supermarket would be closed for the rest of the day.

 

Bitty goes up to his room and draws the curtains, and fills a blank page with tiny, cramped writing until he runs out of space and doesn’t even have room to write his own name. It’s all feelings and fear, word after word spilling like the tears he can’t make. He seals it in an envelope with no photo, no little drawings, and leaves it on the kitchen counter for his mama’s errand run.

 

* * *

 

 

 _I know it’s getting colder and I’m wearing a coat even though I can’t feel it,_ Jack writes, _and I went to a bar with my dad and got called a rotter. My dad apologized to me after we left like he was the one that did it and he clearly told my mom because she came and gave me a hug in the middle of the night, but when I was sixteen and told him I’d been called a fag in the locker room they didn’t react like this._

* * *

 

 

The phone rings, and after a few moments, Bitty’s mama calls his name. He picks up the receiver in his parents’ bedroom, “hello?” coming out cautious and apologetic. He is met by a crackling silence, then a slow exhalation.

“It is you.”

Bitty experiences the idea of his stomach dropping – a memory of the swooping sensation of dread. “With whom am I speaking?”

“Don’t you even remember me?”

Bitty focuses in on the voice, the broad vowels and the twang in the ends of the words. Maybe it’s the vocabulary that’s hitching him up. He hazards a guess.

“Shitty?”

That same slow exhalation. “Jesus Christ, Bits.”

“How –” his voice is coming out high somehow, so he clears his throat and tries again. “How have you been?”

The silence rings so true that he almost hangs up, but then comes the shambling, damp laugh, broken by one or two gasping sobs, and all Bitty can do is wait.

 

“I told them,” Shitty finally grinds out, “that you’d make it back. I told them that if anyone deserved it, it’d be you.”

“You’re the second person to say that to me,” Bitty tells him quietly. Shitty doesn’t seem to hear.

“I told them,” he keeps saying, and also, “they’ll be fuckin’ wild about it.”

 

* * *

  

Bitty doesn’t have a drivers’ license.

 

Well, he does have a drivers’ license, with his haircut from sixteen and a bright and excited grin, but it isn’t at all valid for his drained skin and his unbeating pulse. A long day’s journey turns into four, his interconnecting bus rides monitored by an anxious Suzanne. She had bestowed her own phone to Bitty for his travels – he isn’t valid for one of those, either (‘trusted’ is the word that rings in his head). This is the condition of his ‘vacation’, as his dad calls it.

“What with everything that happened with the Gunderson girl,” his daddy tells his tearful mama, “it’s probably better he’s up north for a bit. Until it blows over.”

 

Bitty imagines the heavy feeling of coverup on his face, and the scratch of contacts on his eyes, and the journey of a letter sent five days before he left. After states of getting stared at and spoken about in barely-hushed tones, his first PDS-friendly accommodation is just outside of Baltimore; it has a little sign at reception, and spare coverup in the bathroom as well as tiny bottles of shampoo and conditioner, and as Bitty lies on top of the duvet, he thinks about leaving Madison for Samwell and the freedom of saying, out loud for the first time, “I’m gay.”

 

He uses bathroom mirrors to contort himself and administer his neurotriptyline, the aftershock sending him to the tiles in a room in the Bronx. The injection site at the back of his neck is persistently black, consistent and sure. Even with orange smeared all over his face, that hole is his reminder: it is him, and his control, and he is redeemed.

 

In these motel rooms, he dreams again of teeth sinking into flesh, but it’s his and Jack’s teeth and each other’s shoulders, cradling each other’s heads in soft hands.

 

* * *

 

There is a poster on Shitty’s living room wall bearing two cutout hands, shaking; one is visibly greyer, with skin missing in chunks and blackened fingernails. The caption reads: _Rebuild. Revive. Respect._

 

Shitty’s cheeks are haphazardly red, and the water he sets down for Bitty is filled too high – he spills it on the coffee table, and apologizes through his entire trip to the kitchen for paper towels. He sits now with his hands sandwiched between his knees, eyes darting between Bitty’s face and a spot a few feet higher.

“This is a nice place,” Bitty tells him, his own fingers picking idly at the knees of his jeans. Shitty just nods. “You’re doing well, then?” Bitty tries again, feeling the distance of old college friends who haven’t reconnected in a while – of old college friends grown apart. _Thanks for coming to my funeral,_ he wants to say, but doesn’t think that Shitty will laugh.

“Yeah, I – uh. I’m a junior associate. We… uh, we’ve got our first PDS client.” He directs this to the space above Bitty’s head, and punctuates it by wiping a shaky hand over his moustache.

“Prosecution or defense?” It comes out harsh and sharp, and Bitty’s back is straight and his hands are claws on his knees. Shitty blinks slowly, drags his gaze to Bitty’s face.

“She died in a hospital. It’s a wrongful death suit.” He reaches up to drag shaking fingers through his hair – longer again, at his chin and slightly stringy with sweat – and Bitty’s sight catches a long scar down his forearm, jagged and newly pearly.

“What happened to you?” Bitty asks, and he means it all – the wound, and the jitters, and the way there’s no soul in his eyes any more.

 

Shitty coughs, and his line of sight finally lowers to rest on Bitty’s face, and he says, “I’ll live.”

 

It hangs between them until Bitty can’t stop the snort he makes, coming obnoxious and dissolving into what can only be called a peal of giggles. Shitty’s eyebrows raise, and soon he’s laughing too, the same guffaw he had at twenty-one, higher than his speaking voice and stupidly cartoonish.

“You’re terrible,” Bitty tells him, and Shitty shoots back, “These are the end times, kiddo.”

 

Bitty’s water goes, of course, untouched, but Shitty asks him the easy questions (“Keeping busy?” “I have my mother’s kitchen, thank the Lord.”) and the hard (“Staying safe?” “Snug as a bug.”) and eventually rises to get himself a beer. Rather than re-seating himself in his armchair, he plonks onto the couch next to Bitty to crack it open. His legs fall apart, knee finding home against Bitty’s, and Bitty stares at the point of connection until he thinks he can feel it.

 

* * *

 

 

Jack is sitting in the café with a glass of water, which sounds like the opening to a joke and brings Bitty up short on the footpath just outside. It was stupid, really, to meet for coffee, but when he had been writing the letter to tell Jack he would be in Boston, the only place that came to mind was one that he had always eaten at while waiting for the Samwell shuttle: cream donut, vanilla latte with an extra shot.

 

He brings fingernails to the glass and taps, once, twice, until Jack turns around, face blank before he smiles. His eyes are pale, piercing like they should be, clear and honest.

 

Jack is on his feet by the time Bitty gets inside, already striding over and meeting Bitty halfway, wrapping arms around him and pressing his face to Bitty’s hair.

“Look at you,” Bitty coos into his chest, and Jack’s dry chuckle vibrates out.

“Look at you,” he retorts, using a grip on Bitty’s shoulders to pull back and appraise him. “You look great.”

“Well, you know. When in Rome.”

It’s the barest hint of an answer; Boston is a big enough city that on the way to the café, Bitty had spotted three other undead without coverup. There had also been a couple holding hands, clear streaks of orange around their collars. It’s the thought that gets him reaching up now, sliding a hand to Jack’s neck to pull him into the kiss. It’s brief, just a meeting of lips and enough time for Jack to hum gratefully into Bitty’s mouth before he pulls away and makes to sit down at Jack’s vacated laminate-topped table.

 

“Wait. Let’s… why don’t we go for a walk, or something?” Jack is still standing, hands in pockets and would-be casual, but the angle of his body is blocking Bitty’s view of the waitress behind the counter. Bitty blinks at him, resisting the urge to crane and see her face, and tries to ignore the sharp spike of annoyance and itch to yell. Impotent rage.

 

Jack holds the door for Bitty, and they fall into step headed the general direction of the Common, shoulders knocking. Bitty waits, but Jack doesn’t seem forthcoming – his usual reticent self. The second living person they pass who stares at them, unashamed, Bitty loops a hand around Jack’s elbow and says, “Did the waitress say something to you?”

 

Jack makes a grunt of a reply, sight locked on the footpath, leaning into Bitty like he’s trying to shrink his deadness away.

“On the plane, the guy I was sitting next to actually asked me if my junk still worked,” he murmurs for Bitty alone, pocketing his hands again and drawing Bitty closer to his side. “There’s coverup in the bathroom of the place I’m staying, but the receptionist practically choked on his coffee when I left with a bare face this morning. And then the waitress. I’m just.” He doesn’t continue, only grits out something like a sigh and pulls his arm from Bitty’s grip to throw it around his shoulders. He doesn’t straighten, face still locked to the ground.

 

Their shadows on the pavement form one amorphous black blot, no light between them. Bitty doesn’t feel any chill in the gust of wind that picks up and ruffles his hair, but he still wraps an arm around Jack’s waist and huddles in impossibly closer.

“I missed you,” Bitty tells him. “Your face was in my dreams, every night. Like this. Like you are, now.”

Watching Jack’s expression as he is, he catches the flicker of a smile and the bob of Jack’s Adam’s apple as he needlessly swallows.

“What if –” he starts, then stops with a grunt. Bitty waits, the soft shuffle of their feet on the pavement the only sound passing between them. He has to tug Jack out of the way of a woman and her pram, earning them a dirty look which melts into wide-eyed fear. She ducks her head and hurries past. Jack doesn’t seem to notice.

 

“You know, it’s funny,” Bitty starts after a few more steps, compulsion to fill the silence bubbling up inside him, “I never really thought about how food was such a big part of my social life. As something to do, I mean. Like, ‘let’s go get brunch’, or ‘I’ll shout you coffee’, or ‘let’s go out for dinner’. How are we supposed to date?”

Jack stumbles a little, something which could be explained by his deadened feet and a crack in the pavement. Given, however, that it is accompanied by Jack repeating the word “date” with an inflective uptick at the end, his abrupt clumsiness seems more the result of Bitty’s words.

“Or not,” Bitty returns, airy as he can, trying to ease his arm from around Jack’s waist.

“No, it’s – Bits. I would have planned… or, I dunno. We could have –” Jack cuts off his own mumbling with a sigh. “Sorry. I forgot we haven’t really done the first date thing.”

“Well.” Bitty reaches up to where Jack’s arm is still draped around his shoulders, and threads their fingers together. “No time like the present, sweet-pea.”

 

* * *

 

 

They end up outside a movie theatre. There aren’t many people milling about, it being the middle of a weekday, so Bitty takes the chance to tug on Jack’s hand and say, “What’s more first date than this?” They take two tickets to the soonest thing showing, and Bitty moons over the sound of fresh-popped popcorn, wistful for its smell.

 

They find seats at the very back of the theatre, and when the lights dim and the music swells and no one else has come in, Bitty lays his hand on Jack’s thigh, just above his knee. Jack rests his hand immediately over it, intertwining their fingers once more.

 

When Bitty looks at Jack, he can see the light from the screen flickering in his pale eyes. He can see the soft upturn of his lips, and the arch in his brow when he looks to Bitty and finds he is being watched.

“What?” Jack asks, and Bitty leans to press a kiss at the corner of his mouth. He lets it linger for a moment, long enough for Jack to turn his head and bring his free hand up to cup Bitty’s cheek. It’s a beat before he opens his mouth, tongue making a gentle sweep across the seam of Bitty’s lips, and Bitty lets go of his hand to throw both arms around his neck.

 

They kiss like that, the armrest digging into their hipbones, Bitty twined around Jack and Jack pulling him somehow closer. Sounds from the film filter through – gunfire, and the _thwack_ of wood on bone, and the word “rotter”, shouted and hissed and sneering. On the screen, the undead are being slaughtered, and in the back of the theatre, Jack and Bitty kiss.

 

* * *

 

 

“What were you going to say? Before, I mean,” Bitty asks as they sit on a park bench in the Public Gardens, looking out across the lagoon. There sunlight still has the crisp silver quality of a chilly day, and the water is turned slate grey by the clouds in the sky, but the leaves are orange and Bitty has Jack’s arm around him once more.

“When?”

“Before the movie. You said, ‘what if’, and you didn’t finish the thought. Finish it now.”

“It was stupid.”

“Don’t make me say ‘there are no stupid questions’, because we both know that’s not true.”

Jack laughs briefly, a courteous noise, and insists, “It doesn’t matter.” Bitty waits.

 

“It’s just –” Jack sighs, not for the first time this day, this time with a tone of despondence. “I’ve always been good at hiding. I’m not sure I want to do it anymore.”

“So, what if?”

“What if,” Jack agrees.

 

* * *

 

 

 _Dear Mama_ , Bitty writes, _I am in love, and he loves me too, and I am afraid for us. They could kill us in the street, and there isn’t yet any law to stop them. I can’t live trapped in the house all day. We can’t go anywhere without people staring. Someone yelled at us the other day, “I’ll put you back in the ground,” and I wasn’t even this scared about playing football or going to school every day and getting called names. I thought I knew what fear was, but the idea of people wanting me dead always seemed more abstract._

* * *

 

 

Shitty opens his door with raised eyebrows and a thin mouth, eyeing Jack with a quizzical expression even though he addresses Bitty.

“Hey, Bitty. Come on in.”

Bitty nudges Jack in ahead of him, and doesn’t miss the way Shitty’s eyes follow as Jack enters his apartment. Bitty also doesn’t miss how Jack’s own gaze goes straight to the poster on Shitty’s wall – that piece of political artwork, heavy-handed and almost crude in its earnestness.

 

“This is Jack,” Bitty says as he lowers himself onto Shitty’s couch, surreptitiously tugging Jack down with him. “He’s my boyfriend.”

 

To his credit, Shitty’s surprise is more a flicker than outright shock.

“You’ve been busy since you died.”

Jack snorts under his breath, and Bitty elbows him in the side.

“You can say no if you want, and we’re absolutely not trying to pressure you into doing anything you don’t want to do, but I didn’t know who else to ask, and you’re definitely the _best_ person to ask – I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have come. Lord, this is such an imposition.”

It’s Jack who tugs this time, pulling Bitty back down to his seat as he tries to stand up.

“You haven’t even asked yet,” he murmurs, and Bitty throws him his most unimpressed look.

 

“We were wondering, I guess, If you knew of anywhere for… people. People like us.” Bitty can’t look at him as he says this, abruptly shy in a way he hasn’t been since Freshman year. He grits his teeth, and turns an unblinking look on Shitty to find that he is being regarded with something like pity. It makes him lay his hand on Jack’s leg once more. He notices Shitty tracking the movement, and the quirk his lips make as he finally settles himself on the armchair.

“Do you mean, like, gay couples? Or Partially Deceased – bruh. Shit. Sorry. Redeemed. I meant Redeemed.”

“What’s that?” Jack’s voice sounds raspy, almost like he’s just woken up, and Bitty thinks back to seeing his face lax with sleep in the bed of his own hotel room.

“Or Undead, if you prefer. Uh. Sorry. _Mea culpa_ , bros.”

The conversation echoes ones from college, of Shitty referring to Bitty as “queer”, and the word sitting sour in the back of Bitty’s throat, like a lump of lozenge. There are facets to his many identities, and it turns out that being dead is just another.

“I think Undead is fine,” he mutters, and Jack reaches to squeeze his knee. “But we were just wondering – is there anywhere? Have you heard of a place?”

 

* * *

 

 

There is a place. In the outer, outer, sub-est of Boston suburbs, the house is small and in the minimal traditional style, with pokey windows and a bricked chimney protruding from the steep slant of the roof. It is also fenced by chain-link, the spokes jutting over the top crossbar with a deliberate animosity.

 

It is a three bedroom house, all of which are occupied. Bitty and Jack are directed to a fold-out couch, above which is a large banner bearing the same shaking-hands motif as the poster in Shitty’s apartment.

 

“If we don’t leave this house,” Bitty whispers to Jack in the dark, them curled towards each other with tangled legs and hands, “then we won’t have to deal with it all anymore.”

 

The place is a halfway house of sorts. The undead come, they stay, the leave. They leave, hopefully with safe homes to go to and a peace of mind.

 

In the daytime, they meet: a couple who died in a car crash, whose daughter had been fostered out with no chance of them getting her back; an old lady who had no children, and no siblings, and no friends left alive; and a boy who died the same age as Bitty with track marks up his arms and one-word answers to all Bitty’s questions. Then, there is him and Jack.

 

“Should we even be here?” Jack mutters to him as they sit on the back porch after a week at the house, looking out over the jungle of grass that would have once been a back lawn. “We have families.”

“I can’t go back there. I love my mama, but I just can’t do it.”

“I could talk to my dad. Maybe. I’ve got savings still, we could –”

“Elope? We can’t legally get married, sweetheart. We don’t exist.”

Jack falls silent, but reaches across to clasp one of Bitty’s hands in both of his own, bringing them to his mouth to kiss Bitty’s wrist.

 

They are runaways, in a sense. They had been surrendered to their parents’ care on release from the facility. Bitty had tried to run away, just once, when he was about eight. He had got as far as the end of the street, his skating kit bag filled with clothes and his skates slung around his neck. His daddy, driving home from work, had found him crouched on the sidewalk, sniffling back tears. Really, he hadn’t been gone more than ten minutes and his mama had thought he was playing in the yard.

 

He doesn’t remember his reason for wanting to run away, but is sure it wasn’t as convincing as the one he currently has. In the letter to his mama, he had written, _I want to stay alive, and I know that Madison will kill me all over again._

 

* * *

 

Apartment hunting is easy: an achievable task, with a set goal, and a direct outcome. They search for _PDS-friendly neighborhoods_ , and it turns out that Shitty’s apartment is smack dab in the middle of one. A good thing, too, because when they find a pokey studio with hardwood floors and reasonable water pressure, they need a living co-signature and Shitty is nothing if not obliging.

 

They move in with little more than a second-hand bedframe and a brand new mattress, and Jack speaks in lazy French as he gives his parents a tour via video chat from Bitty’s mama’s phone. Bitty calls her, and although she cries across the line, she still says, “I love you.”

 

Their daytimes are spent on the streets of Boston, eyeing the businesses that put stickers in their windows bearing a mottled grey fist, fingernails blackened and hunks of skin missing. They usually appear next to rainbow flags, and it is at one such coffee shop that Bitty secures a job. It’s very below-board, cash-in-hand, but Bitty gets to serve gluten-free muffins to young hipsters who try their best to appear unfazed at his bare face and pearly yellow eyes.

 

Jack’s jokes about an undead hockey league almost come to fruition: Shitty catches wind of a community group organizing sports for undead children, and puts forward Jack’s name as a mites coach.

“They’re kind of unstoppable,” Jack muses as they lie in bed one night. “They get knocked down, and it doesn’t hurt them any, so they just bounce right back up.”

 

There are still stares on the street, and one day Bitty comes home from work to find Jack plastered in coverup, eyes solid blue. They don’t talk about it until Jack locks himself in the bathroom, and Bitty can hear him gasping in a wrenched way, sobs from deep in his gut. Bitty presses his cheek to the door, and whispers through it – “you’re fine, baby,” and “I’m right here,” and “I love you so much.” When Jack finally opens the door, he is shed of the contacts, and there are streaks in the mousse baring the lucent skin beneath. Bitty whispers it all again, Jack’s head in his lap as he sits against the headboard of their bed, running his fingers through Jack’s hair.

 

(One of the children Jack was teaching hadn’t turned up to their lesson, because they had been followed home from school by a group of older kids who had baseball bats and thick-toed boots, and –)

 

“This is living. Here, with you,” Bitty tells Jack one morning, and the slight smile he gets in return is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed it! Please leave a comment if you did - it's nice to know how people react!
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